Caravan (Saharan Sands, Hidden Histories, and Family Ties)

Part coming-of-old memoir, part mesmerizing travelogue, Caravan is an elegantly layered account of one woman’s excavation of her own half-erased, half-forgotten past.

Who was this woman? This woman who did so much she could scarcely think?
Who was the girl before this woman?
I peer through the years to the girl I now scarcely know.
She is in shadow.

Caravan is the story of a daughter and her mother, of a family that was never quite what it seemed.

Alexandra Pringle was an editor and publisher, an expert at nurturing and giving life to other people’s stories. Late in life, she discovers she never fully knew her own. Now in her seventies, she sets off on an astonishing adventure with her son Daniel in search of their Berber ancestors, stretching back 2,000 years, from the Middle East to Morocco, through the desert of Mauritania, and onwards to the fabled city of Timbuktu.

Caravan travels the vast, shifting landscapes of her mother’s family, and through memory itself. As Pringle traces the routes of her inheritance, she also reflects on her personal history, that of a young woman finding her independence in the world of art and literature amidst the cacophony of London’s publishing scene. She tells the story of her strong-willed mother, too, a woman determined to run from her history. In Caravan, Pringle runs straight towards it.